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Last release for PHP 5.2 & updates for 5.3

The users of PHP 5.2 should upgrade to 5.3 at their earliest convenience, as the active support of the 5.2 series came to an end with the release of version 5.2.14 earlier today. PHP 5.2.0 was released almost four years ago and according to the release announcement, the developers say that, in future, any further security fixes will only be released on a case-by-case basis. Version 5.2.14 fixes about 60 flaws, some of which present security risks such as potential memory leaks in string functions.

PHP 5.3.3 was released at the same time, containing approximately 100 bug fixes. Among the security-relevant bugs are buffer overflows in the native MySQL driver. This release also contains an incompatible change which concerns methods with the same name as the last element of a namespaced class name. PHP no longer treats such methods as constructors, instead regarding them as arbitrary methods: